I really like gnome the software, but I've started considering moving away from it after a decade simply because of how toxic and difficult gnome the project can be.
I also really like GNOME the software but I moved away a few months ago because of this.
As is, the current GNOME is unusable to me without extensions because they refuse to implement support for appindicators. You literally cannot use applications that minimize to tray on vanilla GNOME right now.
They have been talking about adding their own protocol for years but that is of no use when things are broken right now.
Important features and bug fixes are always stuck in merge request limbo for years. VRR for Wayland got merged recently after 4 years and it's still experimental. DRM leasing is still missing on Wayland, KDE added it 3 years ago.
The final straw was when KDE announced HDR support last year I switched over because I knew GNOME would probably lag behind by months or even years.
As is, the current GNOME is unusable to me without extensions because they refuse to implement support for appindicators. You literally cannot use applications that minimize to tray on vanilla GNOME right now.
They have been talking about adding their own protocol for years but that is of no use when things are broken right now.
So what, just use the extension. Currently no cross-desktop API for systrays that doesn't suck in one or another way exists, so GNOME doesn't have support for them. If you care that much about not using an extension, implement it for yourself.
Yeah, just because the api is not perfect, to just not support it, is no solution.
With that argument you can just skip most interop api, as they all have pain points.
What PR? And what about the missing API that satisfies every/most desktops' needs?
And any GNOME user who needs that can use the extension. I don't really get the point, apart from philosophy, which doesn't really make sense here since nothing perfect exists yet, which GNOME seemingly doesn't like implementing. Maybe some work towards that would be good, but I'm just someone using software for free, without paying anything.
You can check this post post about why gnome has done away with appindicators. Basically everyone has their own and it's a mess, they're very much not bringing them back, appindicators are being replaced altogether by the notification system.
@imecth@cullmann@ohyran@UnityDevice@domi It wasn't true when Allan wrote that blog post, and it's still not true now. If you drop XEmbed and only support SNI (as Plasma did years ago), you have one way to handle it. As it is, Fedora Workstation has an open ticket about adding the appindicator extension because applications are broken without it and Ubuntu maintains and ships it to support a useful user experience.
Currently the ticket is deferred until we resolve updating the SNI spec.
I'm aware of their reason for dropping support but it's not sensible to drop a functioning system and replace it with nothing and then talk about how to do it better for years. That post is from 2017, it's 2024 now and there is still no replacement in sight.
You've missed the part where they have no intention of replacing it. It's bloat. And I agree with them.
Where relevant they've added stuff as a core part of the panel, like recently an indicator for VPN connections. If you want to use an application you can alt-tab to it, like we've done for decades. Everything else is relegated to media controls and notifications. Appindicators are legacy at this point, and they systematically get cut from modern designs like mobiles.
Notifications, you can have the app fire a notification when it's synced or disconnects for example. Gnome is working on better notifications right now. Tablets, chromebooks, cell phones... have been doing fine without appindicators; people just have a hard time changing their habits.
Notifications are more effective at displaying a change of status than a tiny icon turning red.
What's important to someone is gonna vary on a case by case basis, sometimes getting an email is an urgent notification, you can easily turn off the ones you don't care for or go into DND mode.
At least for us, notifications aren't something you can really glance at similarly to app indicators. They're usually text heavy, only really work for longer tasks for readability (which syncing usually isn't), and are always obscured behind another popup for persistent notifications. Persistent notifications also take up more space within the notifications popup, rather than a small icon that you can easily glance at to know what's happening.
As for programs not staying in the task manager, they usually take up less space if open as an app indicator, being able to be passively open but not take up as much space.
The problem is when you allow one developer its own applet, every application wants one, and suddenly you have 15 applets. Applications need to figure out alternative design patterns to achieve the same result or sidestep the problem.
There's this saying, out of sight, out of mind, do you really need to have a constant eye on every application? When there's an actual change you get a notification.
@imecth
Alternative design patterns like PUTTING A SINGLE ICON ON THE TASK BAR SO USERS CAN SEE AT ANY GIVEN MOMENT WHAT A SERVICE OF THEIR CHOICE IS DOING. Like Windows, MacOS, iPadOS, iPhoneOS, ReactOS, Kde Plasma, XFCE, and morr allow?
Do you honestly think an icon bar like this is a good thing? Look at the colors, the amount of them, how they fold because there's too many... And it's the same shit on windows too. It looks ugly, they're hard to click on, most of them don't serve any purpose... I agree appindicators do serve a purpose, but as it is, i prefer not having them at all.
To more directly answer, the only icons I would hide there would be the chrome and Pale Moon ones. However, not having seen those two before, I don't know what they are indicating. I would mouse over them or click on them to see what they are.
Now I am a KDE fanboy to the bone, a KDE eV member and past contributor to several projects ... so I am kinda biased :D so "yes, yes you should" THAT SAID I know a lot of awesome folks in the GNOME project. People who really really are brilliant and fantastic folks the issue is that there is a culture of "be loudest and most self-assured and you're the best" in certain aspects of the project and combined with the GNOME projects stated focus on just GNOME that creates an air of snobbery among some (sadly some of the people most outwardly visible) and a tendency to demand help from others but refusing to give it when asked.
Its a cycle of self-proclaimed victimhood too where they consider any disagreement as either "unprofessional" or just random hostility without reason when it comes from the outside.
Which sucks. Sucks amazingly. Specifically because there are so many great folks in the project doing awesome things for others and the GNOME project who seem doomed to obscurity because of their ability to work with others and not be blustering screaming malcontents due to the projects culture (in certain areas).
EDIT: just to hammer the point home. Amazing project, amazing people but for some reason a handful of people who from the outside look like random asshats have been actively promoted to the top. Perhaps within the project they don't appear as asshats? I don't know. I just know that I have a very very short list of people that I avoid and would leave a project if they where in it because I have seen what they do when in power. Three of that less-than-five list are from the GNOME projects leadership.
And they added back Tango as a fallback and the bug is fixed because now its FDO-compatible... I am pretending the snark at the end by Jakob isn't there and its all good
This is nice to see that Breeze on KDE apps will be default on any desktop (if there is no Qt platform forcing a theme).
I always had issues with Qt theming being too global, so forcing Breeze on only KDE apps was not easy at all (and even more difficult with color-scheme).
Just a quick screenshot from Kate 24.04.80 (beta1 before 24.5.0) on Haiku, I'm not sure if Haiku respects the FDO naming spec, but atleast the icons aren't broken so fallback to the breeze icons for the ones not present in Haiku's icon set still seems to be fine. :)
I really love GNOME but the developers keep doing shit like this and I don't get why. Their reasoning for why they won't allow custom accent colors and only predefined ones was also stupid and then they just said that if people keep asking for custom colors, they won't implement it at all.
That's wild, flat out telling the community they're going to refuse to implement something if they want it enough to ask for it
I won't presume how easy or hard implementing that would be, but I have a hard time believing it would be so significant that this stance makes any sense at all
Okay? Did I say anything about that being owed? They're also not owed a community using their community project, so acting like that just makes no sense and seems counter to a goal of building or maintaining an active community of users
I didn't say they aren't allowed to do that so maybe go have that argument with someone who did.
The reasoning for only allowing predefined colors was that, apparently, developers need to be able to test against every color and that Android's Material You is a total mess. I disagree with both of that, Material You seems to be working quite fine (I've also made apps myself) and I don't get what developers would need to test with accent colors. I couldn't voice my opinion tho cause then the whole thing would've been canned.
Android's Material You is absolutely disgusting though with it's bizarre theming choices and piss-like pastels and fucked notification shade and the dark mode circle jerk and it frankly seems to be an attempt to assassinate material design and everything that made it a defining tech aesthetic of the late 2010s
I never really gave gnome a chance until I came across bluefin recently. I was pleasantly surprised but the lack of customizability always drives me away in the long run.
Im not against opinionated design, their opinion on how things should be just seems to differ from my own.
I can't believe they've been doing this since the very start of the Gnome project. I stopped using it long, long ago (1.1) when they dropped their nice and configurable WM for something you couldn't do anything with. Nice to see they haven't changed a bit.
I’ve had periods where I was switching back and forth, but your entire shell having breaking issues on every minor patch is unacceptable. If they’re also going to break other apps with that, i don’t know how i would recommend it
If Linux is to go mainstream I feel like KDE needs to be the default Desktop experience on distros. The Windows-like style is what the majority of people recognize and are familiar with and the KDE developers seems to care a lot about their userbase.
New users already has a lot to deal with and learn when it comes it Linux. They don't need their desktop environment to work against them too.
I disagree with this, personally. There's a lot more to initial usability/discoverability, than Windows-compatible visuals. If anything, when i've switched a couple of my family members off Windows, they asked me for something that doesn't look like it, because they could never navigate through the desktop properly
As someone who much prefers gnome for my desktop this shit is so frustrating. I'm kinda just waiting and watching to see if they ruin another thing I like about it :(
More closed and non-customizable systems are much more stable. I guess that's what GNOME devs are trying to achieve and I don't really mind it. We have other options for those who need customization. The most used and mainstream one really should be focused on stability. Though I don't think anyone tried breaking icons before. It's a bit too much. The app devs will need to make multiple icons for different DEs which is a good thing but shouldn't be forced like that
The standards are supposed to be the stable thing. If some part of GNOME advertises itself as following a specific standard then it should remain stable in following that standard.
That is a misconception that 99% of the devs don't understand. Sometimes you do need major changes that break stuff to upgrade the base. GNOME started doing it recently. Keeping old bases for a very long time makes them bloated, hacky, slow and unstable
In that case, you implement the old API or other interfaces so older things will continue working, while having the new one alongside it, and then phase the old one out when nobody is using it anymore. It's not that hard to emulate an older API with a newer subsystem. Just a shitload of function wrappers and things so that the things your program used to call now transparently use the new system while the program is unaware anything changed from its perspective.
That's what happens with the Linux kernel. Linus would go apeshit if one of the devs straight up broke a ton of user programs with a change. He's already demonstrated his commitment to not doing that in one of his mailing list rants. Because unlike GNOME, the kernel is running some pretty critical things all around the world.
GNOME seems to be treating their DE like their own little pet project that they're tinkering with alone in the basement without caring that millions are relying on it every day. Breaking a large portion of programs on a regular basis is what I do in the evenings. Not professionals.
Implementing old standards does not magically result in unstable software. I can create software today that implements decades old standards using whatever whiz-bang tech is in vogue.
I do lot accept that “old bases” have to succumb to any of the things you suggest either. Refactoring is a thing. You can remove dead code, you can adopt new patterns, you make code modular, you can even extend using new tech if you want.
Linux is 30 years old ( the basic design is decades older ). Should we throw it out? I vote no but allowing Rust into the kernel seems like a good idea. How old is GCC? How old is Microsoft Office? How old is Firefox? This is software you may use every day. Trust me, your life relies on software that is much, much older. How often do you think they rewrite air traffic control systems or core financial software to to make it more “stable” as you suggest?
I mostly hear your argument when devs want to try new tech and cannot justify it any other way. Most often the result is something that is far buggier and missing many features. By the time the features return, the new code is at least as bloated as the original. Around then, somebody usually suggests a total rewrite.
Old architectures are a different story. Sometimes things are not worth fixing in place. In my experience though, this is fairly rare. Even then, in-place migration to something else often makes more sense.
In my view, if you cannot modernize an old code base, it is a skills issue.
Linus Torvalds is author and maintainer of one of the most successful pieces of software ever written ( software that is decades old and still growing in popularity ).
What does Linus says about your philosophy that “Sometimes you do need major changes that break stuff to upgrade the base”? I think his first sentence explains where he stands but he expands on his initial point.
You’re talking about two different kinds of stability. They are talking about development stability. You are talking about runtime stability.
One thing is to not break applications that use your library because of changes you introduce to it. Specifically changes that go against the standard you’re supposed to be following.
Another thing altogether is to not go outside the memory limits of the application so it doesn’t get yeeted by the kernel.
I've had growing pains for KDE on Wayland in the past but it's been chill in recent times too, I can't remember having any issue related to that for a long time
Reading the bug report about all that ( https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme/-/issues/288 ), it's crazy to see how the gnome dev (Red Hat employee) replies to the issue. He completely ignores the issue in the beginning, then that he doesn't care to follow the spec because it's "old", and yet, he still advertises to the OS as an fdo theme, so OSes ship with it. He's hurting non-gnome apps, and he simply doesn't seem to care about it. To me, this shows a person who simply doesn't care about ecosystem.
If you look at every interaction with a Redhat developer in the context of them having KPIs / set work to do. The responses to non critical issues / MRs makes a lot more sense.
I have defended Red Hat a fair bit over the past year. Their level of contribution to the community is a big reason why.
It is clear though that their prominence comes with a downside in the paternal and authoritative way that their employees present themselves. Design choices and priorities are made with an emphasis on what works for and what is required for Red Hat and the software they are going to ship. The impact on the wider community is not always considered and too often actively dismissed.
Even some of the Linux centrism perceived in Open Source may really be more about Red Hat. For example, GNOME insists on Systemd. Both projects are dominated by Red Hat. There have been problems with their stewardship of other projects.
To me, this is a much bigger problem than all the license hand-waving we saw before.
I was getting really pissed seeing that Pointieststick had to explain the same fucking thing OVER AND OVER again. I don't know if the gnome dev in question is stupid or just trolling.
Familiarity breeds contempt, give it some time and I'm sure cosmic will have its share of haters too. There's hundreds of gnome devs, and all you're seeing are clickbait blogposts like these made to stir up the pot. Go check out the discussions on discourse, matrix, or even gitlab to see what they're actually like.
If the cosmic devs start to behave like the gnome devs, that hate is well deserved. Also, if gnome just abused their own users nobody outside of their userbase would care. Breaking something and then expecting everybody else to clean up the mess is what people hate about gnome. It is a pitty because it sullies the name of gnome as a whole. There are a lot of people doing great work at gnome that now get lumped in with these sad excuses for software developers. For example, I think the gnome UX on a small form factor laptop is unrivaled. My surface tablet never worked better; but I still don't recommend it to anyone else because I know who the devs are and how they conduct themselves.
The problem isn't that every gnome dev is bad - not by a long shot. The problem is that there are just enough gnome devs in just the right (wrong?) positions who have an "our way or the highway" philosophy that it causes problems not just for people trying to use GNOME, but for people (such as the Kate developers) who are trying to give their users a good experience.
And by being the default in so many distros, GNOME has enough clout that if they choose to abandon a standard, many people will change to whatever GNOME does, making their applications worse for people on other desktops.
In the end it's not too dissimilar to the problems created by the dominance of Chromium and Windows. The biggest difference IMO is that Google are actually more conciliatory towards others than the GNOME team are in many cases. Which is kinda crazy given how much Google can throw their weight around on the web.
Google has a swath of PR people, devs are always going to be less socially inclined. Devs at google aren't the ones making the decisions. But yeah gnome does throw its weight around, both for good and bad.
That's because Cosmic is made by really cool people at System76 who actually care about their users/customers and the broader open source Linux desktop ecosystem
I can't wait to throw it on my laptop. I hope the tiling is highly customizable because I need something I can throw on a laptop, not update in a while and still have it not break when I finally do.
I like Hyperland but it does break the config every once and a while.
It's GTK4, libadwaita is just their really weird theming stuff, but the UI toolkit is still called GTK, and version 4 of it forces you to use libadwaita. You can't change the theme, because Gnome is actually user-hostile.
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